Anti-Politics: modern politics and its critics in Denmark, 1830–1848

The rapid politicization of the public sphere in Denmark between the two European revolutionary waves of 1830 and 1848 created not only enthusiasm, but also sharp criticism of institutionalized and segmented politics as inherently alienating and inauthentic. Such anti-political criticism was expressed from a range of different positions: philosophical, poetical, religious and social. This article maps and analyses the conflicting subject positions from which anti-political criticism was articulated as well as the different spatio-temporal delimitations and modalities of politics within each position.     

Currents of radicalism,organised labour and party politics in Britain 1850–1914

This paper will explore the notion of ‘poetic enthusiasm’ in early 18th-century verse. The representation of poetic enthusiasm—the claim to false inspiration, and the fanaticism that was perceived to accompany it—was frequently politicized in this period. Through a conflation of religious and literary discourses, poetic enthusiasm was seen to represent the sae kind of anarchy in the realm of literature that the religious enthusiasm associated with Dissent did in the context of the established church. This paper will establish first of all the way in which Tory and Royalist authors such as John Oldham, John Dryden, and Alexander pope used the established satirical caricature of the religious enthusiast to attack their Whig contemporaries. It will go on to suggest, however, that the relationship between politics and enthusiasm is more complex than this equation between Toryism and anti-enthusiasm suggests. While the Tory attack on literary enthusiasm was premised on an elision of political and literary codes, writers such as Dryden and Pope were also trying to separate out an exclusively poetic meaning for the term. Enthusiasm remained and unstable term because although writers recognized that its religious and political applications were different from its literary sense, they could not easily keep the two apart.     

Before marx: Socialism and communism in France, 1830–1848

Edmund Husserl devoted much attention to the analysis of internal time consciousness beginning as early as the turn of the twentieth-century. His various notes and lectures were left unorganized and unpublished until Husserl's capable assistants were given the responsibility of organizing his work for publication. This paper provides a social and philosophical account of the redaction of Husserl's materials on time consciousness as it involved the activity of his famous assistants Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden and Martin Heidegger. Special attention is given to the way that both Stein and Heidegger appropriated Husserl's work and at the same time challenged fundamental elements of the master's phenomenology.     

Marx–Lenin–Rotten–Strummer: British Marxism and youth culture in the 1970s

This article uses the debate on youth culture that took place in the pages of Marxism Today (1973–75) to explore the ways by which cultural changes and identity politics began to challenge, complement and redefine the British left. The debate revealed much about the tensions that ultimately pulled the Communist Party of Great Britain apart. But it also uncovered faultlines that had ramifications for the left more generally and, perhaps, the wider British polity.     

Shipwreck and salvage in the tropics: the case of HMS Thetis, 1830–1854

In 1830, the British frigate HMS Thetis was wrecked at Cabo Frio, on the Brazilian coast. A British naval force was subsequently despatched to undertake a major salvage operation which lasted for well over a year. The substantial textual and visual archive associated with the case of the Thetis raises wider questions about the entanglement of naval, scientific, artistic, financial and legal concerns in an age of British maritime expansion. If the loss of such a ship brought into question the capacity of the British to act at a distance, it also provided an opportunity to mend and strengthen the networks of power and knowledge. The sources of error exposed by the disaster were to be subject to investigation by numerous authorities, including hydrographers keen to refine their charts and sailing directions and Fellows of the Royal Society seeking to advance the claims of science, as well as the Admiralty itself, in the judicial setting of a court martial. We focus here especially on narratives of the wreck and the salvage of the Thetis, and the significance of their repeated tellings of the story after the event; and on the evidential and representational status of the visual images of the scene in sketches, maps, charts, diagrams, engravings and paintings.